Hello Blog. I've been in New York as you know. We got to the airport very early in case the TSA situation was too bad, and it was bad but not as bad as we planned, so I've got some time to talk to you now. I am not going to recap the whole trip simply because I don't feel like doing so but I will share two places I visited, both on Thursday!
In the morning I went to Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum on the Upper East Side, for Art of Noise. It's a showcase of the history of how we experience music through design both graphic (show posters, album covers) and industrial (stereos, Walksmanses). The exhibit was designed by Teenage Engineering, which meant that there was a large seating area with bright blue benches and built-in TP-7s, each inflated to an aluminum chunk about the size of an LP cover. The motorized platter and controls were still itty-bitty, just anchored in a big metal slab. I've seen demos of these on YouTube but I'd never played with one myself. The vinyl-like playback controls are a fun gimmick.
Also on display was the full cast of Teenage Engineering's Choir series, which are abstract wooden figures depicting various cultural stereotypes that sign and improvise together, allegedly. They sounded like glorious shit, a step or two less sophisticated than HAL 9000's singing voice or Apple's singing text-to-speech voices from the 90s (or earlier?). I walked into their little room as another patron was reassuring the choir, unconvincingly: "Hey, you guys are great!"
Perhaps the most interesting part of the exhibition was this thing I'd never seen that I guess Teenage Engineering built for Virgil Abloh for a Coachella DJ set called "Time Flies." It looks totally custom and the surface certainly is, but it includes consumer-level products embedded in chunks of aluminum, not unlike those special TP-7s installed a few feet away. On the far left you can see a POM-400; indeed on the far right there are four TP-7s lined up in a row; in the center is a two-channel DJ mixer of some sort, and flanking it are halves of a pair of CDJs. I say "halves" because most of the space is taken up by what I think are custom jog wheels, and the screens are cleverly (but not-ergonomically) off to the right side in their own panel.
I swear there was stuff in this exhibit that wasn't just Teenage Engineering products but you're not gonna learn about them on this blog!!
The real highlight for me was two floors below: HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, a specially treated room in the historic mansion featuring "a large-scale, handmade audio system by multi-disciplinary artist Devon Turnbull." There were maybe a dozen seats in front of these enormous, enormous speakers, and it sounded amazing. Some of the music sounded like no recorded music I've ever heard, like the sounds from individual parts of a drum kit were originating from different places in the room. I spent an hour and a half just listening to records in here. Of particular note was Jeff Parker's Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, which I realized at some point was recorded at a jazz bar about fifteen minutes from my house. Those pseudo-multi-channel drums were being drummed by a drummer I've seen drum his drums in person many times before! I've blogged about him! I'm no audiophile but this room is worth the price of admission, I think.
Later that same night was a very different kind of multisensory experience as Amy and I attended Masquerade, the new immersive re-mount of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera. It's good!
We are both big fans of immersive theater: we saw Sleep No More like twelve times (or more?) before it finally closed and Life and Trust, the unofficial sequel, twice before it also closed without ceremony. (We happened to be in town the week it suddenly disappeared about a year ago; our second and last visit was just a couple days earlier.) Masquerade is pretty clearly trying to fill the void these shows left, and it's frankly not really like either one of them in any way except the most superficial: audience members mostly stand for the duration of the show and move from room to room while wearing masks. It's "on rails," not unlike Then She Fell, perhaps the third most notable long-running immersive production in NYC (which we sadly only saw once), meaning there's only one way to experience it, and that one way is carefully guided by ushers throughout, compared to the free-roaming, open-ended nature of the other immersive shows I mentioned.
This is also still The Phantom of the Opera. Imagine that each scene change includes walking up or down a flight of stairs as a shambling group and you've basically got it. This adds a little visceral extrasensory experience but some parts fall a little flat as they seem to struggle between making the audience feel cool and making the audience understand the plot of the musical. I can understand not wanting to stray too far from the source material but I think Masquerade would be stronger creatively if it took some bigger risks.
The sets are exciting, the performances are pretty great (it's a lot of the same cast from the Broadway run of the original show), the music is good if you like the music of The Phantom of the Opera (I mostly do), and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I hope they make some tweaks before I do. (Smaller audiences would help the flow a lot. Rearranging some of the sets in physical space would also help but that's not really possible lol).
Anyway time to get on a plane! Bye for now!